Inconsistency which is obvious to us. For there is a judgment of after

ages which few great writers have ever been able to anticipate for

themselves. They do not perceive the want of connection in their own

writings, or the gaps in their systems which are visible enough to

those who come after them. In the beginnings of literature and philosophy,

amid the first efforts of thought and language, more inconsistencies

occur than now, when the paths of speculation are well worn and the

meaning of words precisely defined. For consistency, too, is the growth

of time; and some of the greatest creations of the human mind have

been wanting in unity. Tried by this test, several of the Platonic

Dialogues, according to our modern ideas, appear to be defective,

but the deficiency is no proof that they were composed at different

times or by different hands. And the supposition that the Republic

was written uninterruptedly and by a continuous effort is in some

degree confirmed by the numerous references from one part of the work

to another.

The second title, "Concerning Justice," is not the one by which the

Republic is quoted, either by Aristotle or generally in antiquity,

and, like the other second titles of the Platonic Dialogues, may therefore

be assumed to be of later date. Morgenstern and others have asked

whether the definition of justice, which is the professed aim, or

the construction of the State is the principal argument of the work.

The answer is, that the two blend in one, and are two faces of the

same truth; for justice is the order of the State, and the State is

the visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society.

The one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek ideal

of the State, as of the individual, is a fair mind in a fair body.

In Hegelian phraseology the State is the reality of which justice

is the ideal. Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom of

God is within, and yet develops into a Church or external kingdom;

"the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," is reduced

to the proportions of an earthly building. Or, to use a Platonic image,

justice and the State are the warp and the woof which run through

the whole texture. And when the constitution of the State is completed,

the conception of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the

same or different names throughout the work, both as the inner law

of the individual soul, and finally as the principle of rewards and

punishments in another life. The virtues are based on justice, of

which common honesty in buying and selling is the shadow, and justice

is based on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and

is reflected both in the institutions of States and in motions of

the heavenly bodies. The Timaeus, which takes up the political rather

than the ethical side of the Republic, and is chiefly occupied with

hypotheses concerning the outward world, yet contains many indications

that the same law is supposed to reign over the State, over nature,

and over man.

Too much, however, has been made of this question both in ancient

and in modern times. There is a stage of criticism in which all works,

whether of nature or of art, are referred to design. Now in ancient

writings, and indeed in literature generally, there remains often

a large element which was not comprehended in the original design.

For the plan grows under the author's hand; new thoughts occur to

him in the act of writing; he has not worked out the argument to the

end before he begins. The reader who seeks to find some one idea under

which the whole may be conceived, must necessarily seize on the vaguest

and most general. Thus Stallbaum, who is dissatisfied with the ordinary

explanations of the argument of the Republic, imagines himself to

have found the true argument "in the representation of human life

in a State perfected by justice and governed according to the idea

of good." There may be some use in such general descriptions, but

they can hardly be said to express the design of the writer. The truth

is, that we may as well speak of many designs as of one; nor need

anything be excluded from the plan of a great work to which the mind

is naturally led by the association of ideas, and which does not interfere

with the general purpose. What kind or degree of unity is to be sought

after in a building, in the plastic arts, in poetry, in prose, is

a problem which has to be determined relatively to the subject-matter.

To Plato himself, the inquiry "what was the intention of the writer,"

or "what was the principal argument of the Republic" would have been

hardly intelligible, and therefore had better be at once dismissed.

Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which,

to Plato's own mind, are most naturally represented in the form of

the State? Just as in the Jewish prophets the reign of Messiah, or

"the day of the Lord," or the suffering Servant or people of God,

or the "Sun of righteousness with healing in his wings" only convey,

to us at least, their great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek

State Plato reveals to us his own thoughts about divine perfection,

which is the idea of good --like the sun in the visible world; --about

human perfection, which is justice --about education beginning in

youth and continuing in later years --about poets and sophists and

tyrants who are the false teachers and evil rulers of mankind --about

"the world" which is the embodiment of them --about a kingdom which

exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up in heaven to be the pattern

and rule of human life. No such inspired creation is at unity with

itself, any more than the clouds of heaven when the sun pierces through

them. Every shade of light and dark, of truth, and of fiction which

is the veil of truth, is allowable in a work of philosophical imagination.

It is not all on the same plane; it easily passes from ideas to myths

and fancies, from facts to figures of speech. It is not prose but

poetry, at least a great part of it, and ought not to be judged by

the rules of logic or the probabilities of history. The writer is

not fashioning his ideas into an artistic whole; they take possession

of him and are too much for him. We have no need therefore to discuss

whether a State such as Plato has conceived is practicable or not,

or whether the outward form or the inward life came first into the

mind of the writer. For the practicability of his ideas has nothing

to do with their truth; and the highest thoughts to which he attains

may be truly said to bear the greatest "marks of design" --justice

more than the external frame-work of the State, the idea of good more

than justice. The great science of dialectic or the organization of

ideas has no real content; but is only a type of the method or spirit

in which the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of

all time and all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh

books that Plato reaches the "summit of speculation," and these, although

they fail to satisfy the requirements of a modern thinker, may therefore

be regarded as the most important, as they are also the most original,

portions of the work.

It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which has

been raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which the

conversation was held (the year 411 B. C. which is proposed by him

will do as well as any other); for a writer of fiction, and especially

a writer who, like Plato, is notoriously careless of chronology, only

aims at general probability. Whether all the persons mentioned in

the Republic could ever have met at any one time is not a difficulty

which would have occurred to an Athenian reading the work forty years

later, or to Plato himself at the time of writing (any more than to

Shakespeare respecting one of his own dramas); and need not greatly

trouble us now. Yet this may be a question having no answer "which